The effects of trade on employment must also be put in the context of the remarkable dynamism of the U.S. labor market. The amount of "churn" in the labor market--the number of jobs created and destroyed--is enormous and reflects the continuous entry, exit, and resizing of firms in our ever-changing economy. Excluding job layoffs and losses reversed within the year, over the past decade an average of nearly 16 million private-sector jobs have been eliminated each year in the United States, an annual loss equal to nearly 15 percent of the current level of nonfarm private employment.⁶ The vast majority of these job losses occur for a principal reason other than international trade (Kletzer, 2001; Bernanke, 2004).  Moreover, during the past ten years, the 16 million annual job losses have been more than offset by the creation of about 17 million jobs per year--some of which, of course, are attributable to the direct and indirect effects of trade. Truly, the U.S. labor market exhibits a phenomenal capacity for creative destruction.

Globalization in combination with advances in technology, especially communications technology, leads to similar patterns. At the upper end, it has boosted demand for those who have the skills to manage large, complex, global operations. In contrast, an increasing share of domestic jobs in the middle of the wage spectrum has experienced lower demand because companies can now look all over the world for workers able to perform computer programming tasks, communications tasks, and similar jobs—even medical services. At the same time, such outsourcing is far less feasible for manual jobs and for service jobs that require face-to-face interactions and lie at the low end of the wage distribution.

Harvard economist Ken Rogoff and others have pointed out that to the extent that globalization increases the degree of competition, it can reduce the “inflationary bias” or, to put it differently, it can strengthen the anti-inflation credibility of a central bank. By inducing greater price flexibility, competition lowers the short-run gains to output from an unanticipated inflation, and thus permanently reduces the incentives for a central bank to try to exploit those gains. The improved credibility of the central bank’s commitment to keep inflation low and stable should, in turn, allow it to deliver better inflation outcomes with fewer short-run costs to economic growth and employment.

We cannot ignore the fact that some workers will lose their jobs as the result of intense foreign competition.  I believe the proper policy response is to ease the trasition costs through retraining, upgrading, and aquisition of new skills.

A policy to dismantle the global trading system in a misguided effort to protect jobs from competition would redound to the eventual detriment of all U.S. job seekers, as well as of millions of American consumers.  Policy should aim to bolster the well-being of job losers through retraining and unemployment insurance, not to stave off job loss through counterproductive efforts to impede the process of income-enhancing international trade and globalization.

Understanding the causes and consequences of economic change are vital to creating a broadly accepted belief in the benefits of technological innovation, unrestricted trade, and the other drivers of economic progress.